Dissertation Research: The Rockets' Red Glare: State, Society, and Technological Innovation in the Soviet Union, 1917-1957

本论文项目提供旅行资金，在美国和俄罗斯收集数据，以火箭学为切入点，考察技术和苏联社会之间不断变化的关系。导弹技术的案例为了解技术与国家之间的关系提供了一个极好的窗口。该项目的重点是工程师和科学家如何处理本土和适当技术之间的紧张关系，以及增量创新和激进创新之间的权衡。通过苏联火箭学的视角，该项目将重点放在苏联历史的更广泛背景下的这两个二分法上，并探索技术(本土的、适当的、激进的、渐进的)与苏联国家的三个要素之间的关系：关于火箭技术在现代化中的作用的公开讨论、发展火箭的机构的创建和演变以及对火箭技术的国家政策。该项目将在40年的时间里追踪这些关系，从20世纪20年代关于火箭的流行讨论开始，到1957年导致Sputnik发射的工业力量的刺激。最后，该项目希望对知识的性质及其与国家、社会和思想的关系提供一些最终的思考。在NSF的资助下，俄罗斯的四个档案馆和美国的两个档案馆将被访问。

This dissertation project provides travel funds to gather data in the U.S. and the Russia to examine the changing relationship between technology and Soviet society using rocketry as an entry point. The case of missile technology provides an excellent window into the relationship between technology and the state. The project focuses on how engineers and scientists handled the tensions between indigenous and appropriated technology on the one hand, and the tradeoffs between incremental and radical innovation on the other. Through the lens of Soviet rocketry, the project focuses on these two dichotomies within the broader context of Soviet history, and explores the relationship between technology (indigenous, appropriated, radical, incremental) and three elements of the Soviet state: public discourse on the role of rocket technology in modernization, the creation and evolution of institutions to develop rockets, and state policy towards rocket technology. The project will trace these relationships over a forty-year span from the emergence of the popular discourse on rocketry in the 1920s to the galvanization of industrial power that led to the launch of Sputnik in 1957. Finally, the project hopes to provide some final thoughts on the nature of knowledge and its relationship to state, society, and ideas. Four archives in Russia, and two in the U.S. will be visited under NSF funding.